For regular gymnastics work you would tend to do about maybe 2-4 different strength exercises.. usually strength moves. Isometrics and then potentially some eccetrics/concentric work. Then move on to circuit (aka metcon-like) conditioning after the strength work. Should take more or less maybe an hour. It is possible to condense it more or expand based on how much time you have.

Typical week depends on the level of conditioning of the gymnasts. The better level of conditioning the more you can do.

Just so you know, the principles that govern weightlifitng also apply to gymnastics and other bodyweight exercises because they both are using the body as the medium to express strength and conditioning work. Rest for strength is typically 3-5 minutes. Conditioning depends on what you're doing.

Usually handstand first, then L-sit then front lever work (well, if you were working planche and cross or whatever you'd throw that in then too around front lever time) and then conditioning from there.

Yes, this is kind of what I am looking for. I want to really work on the gymnastics stuff (really hit it hard) and then finish off my workouts with some metcon. Like I said, I like the SS stuff and think the benefits would be great but I truly want to focus on becoming really good at the gymnastics moves and I always want my conditioning (metcon level) to stay up. Like you said, it's hard to determine a workout for someone based on conditioning levels of others on these posts. As far as I go, I am very well conditioned in the boxer/MMA sense. I do extensive heavy bag, speed bag and jump rope work along with sprints and countless burpees, push ups, pull ups, MU's, dips and the like, but to a muscular endurance level, none of the levers, planches, handstand, OAP/OAC, one arm rope climb, the real strength stuff (yet). My L-sit is fairly decent with my best time being right at one minute. Being 5'9" and 160lbs I definitely have the right size and I think I've got the tools (strength and conditioning) to do well at the true gymnastics stuff. I just need some sort of actual format or progression program. My ultimate goal is gymnastics, gymnastics, gymnastics! Thanks everyone for the great advice.

I assume your gymnastics days you won't be doing strength/metcon afterwards, correct?

Steven!
No I am not doing anything else on gymnastics days, just two hours of working on skills. It would be a shame to loose any precious time with the coach watching me to any other activity. And they kick us out at the end of two hours anyways.
Morning gymnastics is mostly just a short warm-up routine to have some fun and to repeat what was learned in gym.

Alright.. post up some (1) goals and (2) what you can do (for dips, pullups, handstand pushups, planche and front lever isometrics plus their progression pushups and pullups respectively, pistols, and anything else you can think of.) Basically, post everything you know about what you're able to do so I can try to get a gauge on your conditioning level.

Basicalyl for goals it's just gonna be about maybe 4-5 different things you want to work on at once. Usually it's good to have 1-2 leg goals (sprint times, maybe vertical or broad.. squats DL etc) as well as 1-2 for pushing like planches, handstand pushups and 1-2 for pulling (etc. you know the exercises).

Alright.. post up some (1) goals and (2) what you can do (for dips, pullups, handstand pushups, planche and front lever isometrics plus their progression pushups and pullups respectively, pistols, and anything else you can think of.) Basically, post everything you know about what you're able to do so I can try to get a gauge on your conditioning level.

Basicalyl for goals it's just gonna be about maybe 4-5 different things you want to work on at once. Usually it's good to have 1-2 leg goals (sprint times, maybe vertical or broad.. squats DL etc) as well as 1-2 for pushing like planches, handstand pushups and 1-2 for pulling (etc. you know the exercises).

2) What I can do: Dead hang pull ups-32, Kipping pull ups-44, Weighted strict pull up-110lbs.(dumbbell between my legs) MU's-12 in a row, 30 in 6 minutes. L-sit-60 seconds when fresh (only one time). Dips on bars and rings are a lot, never maxed out. Push-ups- a lot with different variations but not able to perform one arm push ups. Pistols- The highest I've done was 20 each leg, I think I could do more. Leg stuff comes easy to me. Sprint time-100m, 10.7 and some change, used to be under 10.5. Vertical-never tested (I don't think it's very good though, I'm 5'9" and can't touch a 10ft rim.)

I think the four or five progressions I would want to work most on are the basic planche (still falling over on the simple frog stand), the front lever, the HSPU, Push to handstand, back lever. I would figure that learning these moves would allow me to hopefully also perform a OAP/OAC, one arm, one leg push up.

1. What days can you work out? and what type of schedule would you prefer?
2. For lower body do you want no heavy lifting like deads and squats or all bodyweight or a combination. All of the options can be done...

1. What days can you work out? and what type of schedule would you prefer?
2. For lower body do you want no heavy lifting like deads and squats or all bodyweight or a combination. All of the options can be done...

I am a firefighter and work a 24 hrs. on, 48 hrs. off schedule. Sometimes I get the chance to work out at work, sometimes not. I either do two workout days in a row with one off (the day off being at work) or sometimes adhere to the CF 3 on 1 off, again depending how much down time I have at work. I can adjust accordingly. As far as the lower body, if I can still do a combination of heavy deads and squats with bodyweight stuff, that would be great, I certainly do not want to limit myself.

Mirza - Now that I think about it, alternating cycles of SS and gymnastics sounds like good programming to continue to add strength. Not looking for extreme detail, but what does a typical week look like when you're doing a cycle of gymnastics strength work. How long are your sessions? What moves do you work? How often do you rest? Do you do met con? So much for not asking for detail....

What I'm wondering is, if I'm trying to get a long ring L sit, a front lever, and a 2 min. handstand, what's the best way to approach it from a programming standpoint. There has to be a thread on this, so I'll search regardless of if I get any answers. Thanks in advance!

Well Steven first suggested this workout for me which incorporated Oly lifting, Power lifting and Ring work to help me gain mass as well as further my goal of being able to pop out a stralde planche on a consistant basis all day long, same for the front lever and cross. I chose those three because they compliment eachother good as far as balance goes and because more than that I would find my attention to each would suffer more than any possible gain by doing an extra hold etc.

This is the post containing the routine I used for a short period. The topic of the discussion was how to gain mass to be more proportionate. I feel that I'm too skinny for my height so I wanted to fill out, but at the same time wanted to progress my gymnastics skills. Also as a side condition the workout had to be structured so that I wouldn't gain excessive weight in my legs and hinder my gymnastics moves.

So this was formed:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steven Low

Again, it's not particularly hard. I would prefer a 5 on 2 off schedule because I think it's easier to scheudle weeks that way.. but anything that's 5/2 can really be modifed to 3/1 or so. Basically I'm going to use a 5/2 template so whatever.

P.S. If you didn't know already rest AT LEAST 3 minutes between sets. No less. I like 5 minutes.. and you can more or less take up to about 7 minutes or so. Just to clear that up. I have lots of friends who want me to help them gain strength and then start doing circuits with the exercises I give them or only rest a minute. They're mainly going to start building endurance/conditioning instead. I roll my eyes at them and yell at them.. and some of them refuse to listen. Oh well, not my problem.

P.P.S. I hope you're getting at least 8 hours of sleep a night and your diet is top notch otherwise you're gonna burn yourself out real quick even with this thing I wrote to be a little more friendly than your previous efforts.

P.P.P.S. After looking over it again I think the volume on the upper body is extremely high. Again, if you starting burning out reduce the amount of sets of the 5x3 work down to 4x3 or 3x3.

SOOO after a few weeks of just being way too tired and missing workouts due to fatigue I decided that I had to re-evaluate my conditioning level and my goals. What I think happend was in short is that my body couldn't recover in time. I knew this and rested more, HOWEVER; the workout kept falling behind reducing its efficiency. After a few weeks my arms were really beat up because of how differently rings, slow heavy lifts and explosive heavy lifts each affect your body and muscle. I know that at some point in the future I am going to be able to do a routine like this; once I'm better conditioned.

Logically, I split the workouts and cycled them. So I ended up with this for the first 6 weeks.

The accesory exercises for each workout I do on rings just because it's a better medium to do them on.

After the next six weeks I'll probably get with steven and we'll figure out a good routine to try to blast out and cut up for the summer. Most likely it will be strenght > metcon and split by push / pull on the rings 4 days per week or something. I'm not too sure yet.

So far so good; I'm also drinking the milk as RX'd and seeing gains in fat and muscle size. One thing for sure is that I've never had a hard time LOOSING weight so im not too worried about any permanent padding.

Great post, thanks for all the detail! Steven's 5/2 program looks brutal. Definitely something to aspire to. Right now I'm doing strict SS programming with weighted dips (Workout A) and chins (B) as accessory 2x8. I'll probably continue for another 8-10 weeks depending on results, but I'll be interested to see how your transition from SS to ring work goes. I'll bug you again in 8 weeks or so to see how you're progressing. Good luck with it.

By the way, don't know if you're experiencing the same, but the milk is getting much easier to drink. I hardly ate anything during my first day last week, now I'm on my 7th gallon and I can eat 3 squares per day and a few snacks.

Ryan actually asked a similar question as Mirza to a PM so I modified it and reduced the volume drastically yielding this:

Quote:

Originally Posted by Steven Low

Quote:

Originally Posted by Ryan Blair

Hey steven, I was wondering if you could help me to put together a routine to incorporate BW movements + rings with SS. I've read alot of what you've said on the subject so I have an idea, but would like your input.

I'm 5'8 170 and started CF about 6 months ago. I just recently decided to try to work on my core lifts and get stronger so I'm one week into SS. I'm doing MWF A, B workouts just as Rx'd exept I'm doing some weighted chins and weighted dips in place of bench. I read where you said dips were of much more use in gymnastics. On T, Th, Sa I have been doing some sprint work of distances less than 440m.

I have read Coach Sommers article and am able to do the tuck planche and tuck lever. The only cross related thing I've done is to set the rings up so that I'm in about the cross position and then used a little leg power to pull to support. I do have the ring work dvd that cam with my Tyler Haas Rings.

So should I replace the sprinting work for the BW stuff on T and Th?
Should I just try to work the progressions as Sommer laid out?
And how about ring progressions?

I'm at the front end of this so I would like to take the most efficient path. So if you could give me some direction that would be awesome.
My goals are strength centered and I would like to do the 5 on 2 off, but I'm flexible with everything else.
Thanks for any tips and info.
Ryan

Well, here's the thing. I don't like messing around that much with SS because by itself it is an independent program. Done right it should do what it's intended to namely bring up your major lifts extremely fast and add mass. Now, adding to it is not necessarily bad, but it can compromise recovery.

That said, I will mess around with it. The main thing you probably want to do is use rings work and other bodyweight progressions for everything upper body if that's the case. I hope you have rings so you can do this stuff.

I'm going to modify Mirza's actually according to your particular goals here (from your post I am assuming you want front lever, planche and cross). I am also going to drastically cut down on the volume because I'm not sure if you can handle it cause Mirza said he had a fairly high conditioning level but then he couldn't keep going which was kind of annoying (might not be his fault though). Basically, I'm going to drastically reduce the strength work and align it towards 2x5 and 3x5 since this will reduce the set volume and the high intensity stress hopefully to a managable level. To be honest, not even sure if I could have handled the previous workout, lol. Definitely not as a beginner to cross work.

This should be much more managable if you have a good conditioning base. If you don't you might get thrashed. I'm warning you.. lol.

Basically this should be more managable.. possibly still too much if your conditioning base is average. To be honest it can be simplified even more but yeah some overreaching is good going into the 2 days rest.

I'm actually going to mod this program to your goals. Since you mentioned 3/1 would probably work the best, I think we can throw together a 3/1/2/1 that would work well for you. If you happen to miss a day then you can always switch it up to like 2/1/3/1 or whatever given that sometimes you can't workout on certain days when you're busy. This is fairly more flexible and will use a weekly schedule which seems to work well. If you miss a workout it's not as big a deal either since these workouts (like CF) will push you to your limits.

For press to handstand, do you mean the technical one that the gymnasts do or just any old one with bent arms from like L-sit? If it's the technical one you should practice these are SKILL work before your workout. Work on negatives and your flexibility and this will get you there (although it will take a while since you're big).

FYI I tried to scale it as best I could starting with fairly low isometric work (15s) and then working your way up but if you feel beat down after two weeks drop down the times across the board (or get rid of some work).

** Back lever is basically same progression as front lever -- tuck, adv. tuck. straddle, full back lever; you can also use one leg out, one leg in instead of the straddle.
*** If you can't do this put your feet at head height and lean forward as far as you can 3x10s.
**** If can't do these start at 3 reps and work your way up with the tuck. If you still can't do that then do bent over rows.

I'm programming in 2x8 as fairly higher volume work which puts much less stress on the CNS (since you already have enough) and will tend to hit your slower twitch muscles better. More or less like light-heavy work which tends to work well for humans (except it's a combination light-heavy workout which is also fine).